This paper explains how the project addresses the security and interoperability challenge, by providing a resource abstraction layer spanning multiple cloud providers and enabling users to deploy clouds with self-service security. It also illustrates several use cases, from the healthcare domain, showing how SUPERCLOUD architecture can be mapped to the real world.

SUPERCLOUD main focus takes into account the cloud market evolution, where clouds are becoming federated thanks to fully distributed infrastructures across heterogeneous resources, instead of in a single private datacentre. A promising vision of distributed cloud computing is a unified world of multiple clouds, with business benefits at hand. However, this new distributed computing raises concerns on the complexity, security and lack of interoperability between heterogeneous infrastructure technologies.

SUPERCLOUD project aims to provide a new paradigm for security and dependability management of distributed clouds. SUPERCLOUD follows both user-centric and self-managed approach, to allow users to achieve provider independence for security management. The paper was written by members of SECURECLOUD international consortium, from both industry and academia sectors, being published on IEEE Cloud Computing special issue.